Why rss.xml is the contract

A note is shorter than an essay, but it still gets a permanent URL and a place in the feed. That’s the whole point: anything worth saying once is worth being able to link to forever.

The feed — rss.xml — is the contract. No newsletter that needs your email, no algorithm deciding what you see, no account to create. You subscribe, I publish, the bytes show up. That’s it.

RSS is old on purpose. It predates the attention economy and never picked up its habits: it can’t track you, can’t reorder itself to keep you scrolling, can’t be A/B tested against your willpower. A feed is just a list of things, in the order they were published, that you chose to follow. Your client, your rules, an unsubscribe that actually works.

That’s why it’s a contract and not a feature. Features come and go with redesigns; a contract is the part I promise not to break. As long as this site exists, the feed will be there, it will be complete, and it will be plain text anyone can read. If I ever add an email list or a login, they’ll be conveniences layered on top — never the toll you pay to read. The bytes show up. That’s the whole deal.